LATEST EDITION – The current members of the 41-year-old New Black Eagle Jazz Band will line up to play at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod June 29.

Traditional jazz will rock Yarmouth’s Cultural Center

The New Black Eagle Jazz Band (NBEJB) is coming back to Cape Cod.

They’ll be playing at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod, in South Yarmouth, on June 29 at 8 p.m. Performers of traditional New Orleans flavored brassy jazz, they are in their 41st year of playing everywhere from central Massachusetts to central Europe. That’s almost as long as the life of their youngest player, their new bassist, Jesse Williams, who is 42.

Tony Pringle, a cornetist who is the musical leader of the band and one of its five remaining original members, said the NBEJB used to play at Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich – “to two and a half thousand people” – and once performed in Provincetown with the great folk singer Odetta.

Pringle, 75, said, “The band is sounding just as good now as it ever has.”

And that’s plenty good, considering that they have played with the likes of Milt Hinton, who, according to his entry in the cookbook Jazz Cooks, was known as “the dean of jazz bassists” for his collaborations with Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, and Etta Jones.

Pringle recalled that in the early ‘90s, the NBEJB contacted Hinton, who was then 82, about doing a gig with them in Atlanta. Because of his age, they offered him a chance to play just one show, or to split some dates with another bassist, but Hinton insisted that he wanted to play with them for the whole run.

“He slapped that bass,” Pringle said, “and then he double-slapped it, and then he triple-slapped it. The audience was going wild,” especially during their performance together of Duke Ellington’s classic “East St. Louis Toodle-Oo.”

The NBEJB also has six arrangements they can play with symphony orchestras. So far, they have performed these with the Boston Pops, the Baltimore Symphony, and “the best,” in Pringle’s opinion, the Scottish National Orchestra. According to their website, they had a “particularly invigorating experience” playing with the Euregio Jeugd Orkest, “a bunch of very talented youngsters from Brabant, Limburg, Vlaanderen in Holland and from Germany.” They’ve even played in Singapore.

They also, several times, played a church during a music festival in Pennsylvania. A former member of the band, a physician, had a connection there with a medical school classmate, Pringle said. He joked that the best seven years of that tradition were when they worked with a minister whose sermons mostly involved “making remarks about members of the band. He quit because he said he’d run out of things to say.”

The New Black Eagle Jazz Band’s website lists the band’s first performance as Sept. 30, 1971 on the Peter Stuyvesant, a boat that was moored alongside Anthony’s Pier Four restaurant in Boston. They were the successors of an earlier ensemble called, not surprisingly, the Black Eagle Jazz Band. In October of the same year, they began an engagement at the Sticky Wicket Pub in Hopkinton that lasted nearly 20 years. They have even played on Morning Pro Musica, the public radio classical broadcast.

Cultural Center publicity promises that the NBEJB will offer tradition New Orleans music in the style of Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, Jelly Roll Morton, and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, as well as “selections by Duke Ellington and a little Ragtime to spice the pot.”

Tickets for the New Black Eagles (blackeagles.com) are $20, or $18 for members of the Cultural Center. They can be purchased at the Center, 307 Old Main St. in South Yarmouth, near the Bass River Bridge, or by calling 508-394-7100. The Center’s website is cultural–center.org.